Video previews in search results with previews

Google somewhat-recently launched Instant Previews in its SERPs (search engine results pages), where you can hover over a magnifying glass to preview a landing page before committing to a click. It now supports previews for video content, showing not only a few thumbnail images but also very short clips of the video, with or without sound.

Google Adwords’ appended URLs

Adwords announced a global change to the way your text ads are displayed. Ads are now appended with the display URL automatically.

My observation – this only happens when the ad is in the magic bluepurplegreen yellow box and when there’s enough room.

My concern with this tactic is stuffed headlines are actually harder to read and scan. While I suppose they can give a branding boost by showing the URL, they may make the headlines ignored altogether. Making some brands more prominent than others also seems a bit unfair. If it does impact click through positively, the “rich get richer” (the highest CTR ads that win the top spots will stay there).

Nevertheless, it’s important that you understand your headlines have been changed without your consent, and this change can impact your campaign performance for the good or the bad. It’s a good idea to annotate the date of this change so you can see the changes in your web analytics. Ideally, Adwords would have provided advertisers with the ability to split-test with and without the display URL in the headline, and an option to turn the feature off.

Google Analytics Site Speed Report

While there’s been a whole whack of adjustments in the new Google Analytics (version 5), perhaps the most exciting is the site speed report.

This report will tell you which landing pages load the slowest, which campaigns correspond to faster page loads and how geography and browser type differ in performance.

Once you identify where the issues are, you can take measures to optimize these pages. Here’s a tip – pay the most attention to the pages in your checkout, not just “landing pages.” Many carts are not abandoned because a button was the wrong color, but because tables, graphics and other objects were…taking…too…long…to…load…

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